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A translation and psychometric investigation of the South African career interest inventory across gender and race among secondary school learners

Rabie, Stephan (2017-12)

Thesis (D.Phil)--Stellenbosch University, 2017.

Thesis

ENGLISH SUMMARY: A major component of the practice of career counselling and assessment is the measurement of vocational interests. Both globally and in South Africa, John Holland’s (1997) theory of vocational personalities is one of the most influential career theories, providing a theoretical framework from which practitioners develop and administer vocational interest inventories. However, technological advances in the course of the 21st century have resulted in a rapid transformation in the world of work, rendering popular career interest inventories based on Holland’s model obsolete, both in terms of content and occupational environments. To address these limitations, Morgan, de Bruin, and de Bruin (2014) employed Holland’s typology and constructed an interest inventory, namely the South African Career Interest Inventory (SACII), for a South African university student and young adult sample that yielded reliable and valid scores.
Building on this foundation, the aim of this quantitative study was to further explore the validity of the SACII by investigating gender, racial, and language differences in the psychometric properties and interest structures of female and male, Black, Coloured and White South African Grade 9 learners (n = 628), as measured by the SACII. To achieve this aim, the present study also involved translating the SACII into isiXhosa, hereby constructing the first career interest inventory in an indigenous South African language. The study also provided a back-translation of the Afrikaans version of the SACII. Using convenience sampling, all Grade 9 learners from five secondary schools in the Cape Winelands District of South Africa were included as participants for the research sample. Accordingly, the research aimed to investigate whether the SACII can be applied validly, reliably, and indiscriminately on a sample of middle adolescents across different gender, race, and language groups.
The results for the present study provided support for the reliability and validity of the scores on the SACII across different racial and language groups in South Africa, but failed to find support for the equal applicability of the scale across gender. Gender, race and language comparisons demonstrated the best model fit for the respective female, Black and isiXhosa participants. It is recommended that future studies further explore the gender difference on the SACII with sample groups diverse in race, culture, age and language. Moreover, future studies should conduct measurement invariance tests to determine the validity of the different language versions of the SACII. In summary, it appears that practitioners may continue to use Holland’s (1997) model in career assessment and counselling in the South African context when a valid career interest inventory, such as the SACII, is employed.